Equinix has announced its expansion into India with a US$161 million acquisition of GPX Global Systems’ two data centers in Mumbai.
The global interconnection and data center company will provide its enterprises with access to a network-dense data center campus and services from more than 200 cloud and internet service providers like AWS, Google and Oracle.
“The acquisition of GPX’s business in India means we are able to make a giant leap forward in terms of growing our ecosystem in India, and gives us a solid foundation for rapid growth and expansion in the country,” said Charles Meyers, the President and CEO of Equinix.
The campus in Mumbai will add more than 90,000 square feet of colocation space and currently has 1,350 cabinets, with an additional 500 cabinets to be added at full buildout.
Comprising the campus, firstly GPX Mumbai1 is India’s first Uptime Institute Tier IV designed facility spanning 30,000 square feet. Secondly, Mumbai2 is also Tier IV certified and will be 60,000 square feet in size when completed.
“After seven years of building our business in India I could not think of any company better suited than Equinix to expand the platform GPX has created in India and help our customers continue to grow,” said Nick Tanzi, the President and CEO of GPX Global Systems.
Mumbai is strategically located and includes international connectivity serviced by nearby subsea cables.
“As major cloud players establish themselves in the market, this move will provide enterprises with the infrastructure they need to embrace rapidly growing trends such as hybrid multicloud and digitisation,” said Jeremy Deutsch, the President of Equinix Asia-Pacific.
The long-awaited entry into India by Equinix comes at a time when the country’s data center market is expected to reach a value of US$3.2 billion by 2024 and digital communication services are projected to double in size by 2025, contributing US$355-435 billion to India’s GDP.
“Our forecasts show that the country will become the seventh largest data center market in the world in 2021,” said John Dinsdale, the Chief Analyst and Research Director of Synergy Research Group.
The cloud services market in India is also forecast to grow threefold to more than US$7.1 billion by 2022.
Data centers like those acquired by Equinix are set to help local enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journeys with high-quality infrastructure and services closer to the edge.
Manoj Paul, the Managing Director for carrier-neutral data center provider GPX Global Systems, said: “The appetite from global companies for expansion into India is matched by local interest in expanding overseas.”
The deal between Equinix and GPX is predicted to close in the first quarter of 2021 following regulatory approval.
